Despite my obsession with analytics, I struggle deeply with perfectionism. Perfectionism can be the demise of financial projections, fitness plans, and marketing plans alike. I have found that I tend to obsess too much on how accurately and completely I collect my data. When it comes to analytics, the 80/20 rule holds up.* Typically the point to measuring and visualizing data is to help you address or discover a problem and come up with  a solution. The problem is not how accurately and completely can you collect data, but how many new customers do you need to pay overhead, or how many fewer calories must you consume to lose weight. You simply need enough data to detect trends and make predictions.

For example, I’m currently tracking my activity levels using a FitBit. I love this sort of passive data collection. However, one part of the FitBit I’ve been avoiding like the plague is calorie counting. It bothers me that recording a turkey sandwich doesn’t take into account that I’ve used low fat mayonnaise and 2% milk cheese. The thing I’ve struggled to come to terms with, is that reality and models are not the same thing. I’m not “cheating” myself by estimating the amount of calories that are in a turkey sandwich, nor does recording slightly too many calories change the fact that in reality I’m using low fat mayonnaise. These data points are simply there to illustrate the big picture. Obsessing about minutia creates unnecessary work, can lead to burnout, cause you to ovoid data collection all together, and in general won’t significantly affect the overall trends and solutions you can discover by collecting and analyzing data.

The take away? Just like in creative endeavors, perfectionism can poison your analytical efforts. Relax. So your financial projections are off twenty bucks, you can still see the trends of your business. In most real world applications “good enough” produces results, while perfectionism causes paralysis.

* side note: I should mention that some scientific experiments require a level of data accuracy greater than “good enough.” However, the analysis of most aspects of my business and life do not require such detailed data samples, and I suspect neither do most peoples.

In 2011 Forbes estimated Scrooge McDuck’s net worth to be $44.1 billion! He is the richest fictional character imagined, according to Forbes magazine. His favorite pastime is swimming in a giant vault of gold coins.

Scrooge McDuck - Net Worth $44.1 Billion

In contrast, Bill Gates net worth is estimated to be $56 billion!

Bill Gates - Net Worth $56 Billion

Bill Gates has more money than your childhood’s richest fictional character!

If you try installing PHPUnit-3.5.15 first, you’ll find PEAR forces you to install 3.6. The way around this is installing the old versions of all of the PHPUnit dependencies.

First you need to uninstall PHPUnit 3.6 and all of it’s dependencies.

sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/DbUnit
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHP_CodeCoverage
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/File_Iterator
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/Text_Template
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHP_Timer
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit_MockObject
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit_Selenium
sudo pear uninstall pear.symfony-project.com/YAML

Next install these specific versions of each dependency, in this order, installing PHPUnit-3.5.15 last.

sudo pear install pear.symfony-project.com/YAML-1.0.2
sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit_Selenium-1.0.1
sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit_MockObject-1.0.3
sudo pear install phpunit/PHP_Timer-1.0.0
sudo pear install phpunit/File_Iterator-1.2.3
sudo pear install phpunit/PHP_CodeCoverage-1.0.2
sudo pear install phpunit/Text_Template-1.0.0
sudo pear install phpunit/DbUnit-1.0.0
sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit-3.5.15

Now you should be good to go!

Jelly in Austin

Some of you may remember back in good ol’ 2007, a meetup in Austin I used to organize called Jelly. We met at coffee shops and coworked together for the whole day, once or twice per week. Jelly is a product of Amit’s mind, and it was a combination of my desire for a coworking space, a lack of money, and Amit’s genius free Jelly coworking meetups, that inspired me to start Jelly in Austin. These meetups later broke off and evolved into our city’s first coworking space Conjunctured, which uncovered a need, that has since set in motion many other coworking spaces in Austin. So, if you enjoy coworking in our fair city, you owe Amit a bit of thanks.

Amit posted about his diagnosis on his blog. He also posted several ways that we can help. I’ve reposted them below as a quote from his blog:

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

1. If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
2. If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
3. If you know any South Asians(India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.

*NEW* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheeks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.

Please help however you can. I mean come on, just look at this guy. How can you not love him and want to help?

Real-time Business Dashboard

The picture above is my HP Touchpad setup to display my business’s dashboard when my Touchpad is charging and idle. With a simple glance to my left I can see the current status of my entire business. My dashboard shows me recent tweets, sales, website visitors, uptime, errors, and will soon include more metrics as I continue customizing it.

The ingredients for this setup are simple.

• HP Touchpad - A lot of people have one of these lying around now since HP’s fire-sale. This is a good way to put it to use.
• HP Touchstone – If you own a Touchpad, get a Touchstone charging stand! This thing is amazing. It does NOT require that you plug or dock your tablet into it. Merely placing your Touchpad on the stand begins charging the device. It’s voodoo magic, pure and simple. Additionally, the stand makes interacting with the tablet much easier if you’re at a desk.
• Geckoboard.com Account – This is the software behind the dashboard. It’s hosted, and they create a unique URL for you to access your custom dashboard.
• webOnEx – This webOS app ties everything together. When your Touchpad has been idle for awhile on the charging stand, it goes into Exhibition mode. The webOnEx app allows you to display a webpage during Exhibition mode instead of the default clock or photo album. Our webpage is our customized Geckoboard dashboard.

You can get webOnEx by going to “settings” on your Touchpad, then to “Exhibition.” Next click on the “Find More…” button at the botom. Finally lookup webOnEx and install it. After it’s installed, go back to the Exhibition settings and select webOnEx as the default. When your tablet goes into Exhibition mode, you can change the URL of webOnEx to your Geckoboard dashboard.

If you want to call a Javascript function, but only if it exists, here’s one way you can do that.

function ifFnExistsCallIt(fnName)
{
   fn = window[fnName];
   fnExists = typeof fn === 'function';
   if(fnExists)
      fn();
}

I use “fn” as a variable name inplace of the word “function,” since “function” is a reserved word in Javascript.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app that uncovers this data, and sure enough, you can see nearly everywhere I’ve been for the last year or so.

The funny thing about this is I’m the type of person who would probably opt-in to a program that tracked my travels. I like being able to visualize the map above. However, the fact that Apple did this in secret, without my permission, clearly crosses into unethical behavior, whatever their intentions were/are.

The moral of this story is Steve Jobs is watching you!

There is something you can do though! You can join (or donate to) the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). The EFF is the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the information age.

Apple’s response should be pretty interesting.

My Fancy Wallet

For about 4 years now I’ve been rocking the Hipster PDA.  I carry a stack of blank 3 by 5 index cards in my wallet (see the pic to the right on exactly how that works) and use them for to-do lists and discardable notes. I also cary a full-size hardback Moleskine for notes I intend to keep, though not necessarily for journaling. I typically only write jornal entries when I need to dig myself out of a rut. But I digress.

Benjamin Franklin's Daily Schedule

I recently started listening to Benjamin Franklin‘s autobiography. I admire Franklin and I’d like to imitate certain aspects of his character. One thing that really struck me was his outline for a perfect daily routine. He mentioned that he himself was terrible at sticking to the routine as he must “mix with the world” and ”often receive people of business at their own hours”, but one idea I really liked was the first thing he had on the schedule: ask yourself “what good shall I do this day?”

This is basically the creation of a to-do list for the day. Big deal. I’ve been writing to-do lists constantly for 4 years. But what I really liked about this notion was the phrasing and the ritual. I typically write a to-do list only when I feel overwhelmed, to help add order to my life. But Franklin’s outlook is not “make a to-do list when you feel overwhelmed” it is, every day consider what good you will do. In addition he sugests every night evaluate the good you’ve done that day.

Small Moleskine Journal

So, in an effort to be more like one of my role models, I’m moving my to-do list from index cards, that I quickly discard, to a more permanent small paperback Moleskine, that I’ll cary in my pocket. By keeping my daily to-dos together in a book, I’ll be able to flip back on previous days to find items I’ve forgotten about or neglected. And, at the beginning of everyday, instead of writing “to-do,” I will write “what good shall I do this day?” I hope that by writing this it will put me in the frame of mind to not only consider my daily minutiae, but also what I can do that is truly good.

I prefer to donate to classes in Austin, but I also like to search for projects that are only a few bucks from completion and finish them. To aid my effort in finding projects that are near completion I created a Twitter account, called @AlmostCompleted, that tweets when it finds a project that needs less than $20. I have Twitter send these tweet to my phone via SMS so I know about it immediately. Why? Just for fun. I can’t afford to complete every project that needs less than $20, but you have to be fast if you find a project near completion that you want to donate to.

Creating this Twitter account was very simple. I’ll detail the steps here so you can create an account with your own search criteria. For example, you could create an account that only tweets project in your state that need less than $20. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Create a new Twitter account.
2. Go to the DonorsChoose.org projects listing page and use the filters on the right hand sidebar to find the projects you’d like to tweet about.
3. Once you’ve got your search criteria figured out, look at bottom of the project listings. On the left hand side you’ll see a drop down menu that says “Add to your website or feedreader.” Click on that drop down menu and select “RSS 2.0.”
4. A new tab will open up with an RSS feed of projects that meet your search criteria. Copy the URL of this RSS feed found in your browser’s address bar.
5. Next you must create a FeedBurner.com account.
6. After you have a FeedBurner account, login and where it says “Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:” put your RSS feed you copied in step 4.
7. Next, in FeedBurner, go to the “Publicize” tab and select “Socialize” found in the left hand column.
8. In the “Socialize” section you can connect the Twitter account you created in step 1. In the options, for “Post content,” you’ll probably want to select “Title and Body,” and you’ll definitely want to make sure you checkmark “Include link.” Other than that, you’ll can play with the other options however you’d like.
9. Finally click the “Save” button in the bottom left hand of “Socialize” section.
10. That’s it! You’re Twitter account should Tweet every 30 minutes or so if there are new projects that meet your search criteria on DonorsChoose.org.

In FeedBurner you might also want to turn activate “PingShot.” I understand that should make your Tweets update faster, but I’m not sure how well it actually works. To activate “PingShot” under the “Publicize” tab, select “PingShot” found in the left hand column, then click “Activate.” That’s it! Enjoy!

Please give @AlmostCompleted a shout out on the Twitter!